Traditional hearing aid processors operate independently within a user's left and right ear (see e.g. U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,005,246; 8,406,442). As each hearing aid only receives a mono signal, there is no need to perform centralized or stereo processing on an incoming sound stream, which is simply processed locally by the hearing aid or mono receiver. However, the advent of wireless audio transmission technologies such as Bluetooth has enabled audio processing to become centralized on one core processor, allowing for more sophisticated stereo sound processing techniques. In these instances, a stereo signal is received at a single decoder and the decoder extracts a multichannel audio signal from the received stereo signal (see e.g. U.S. Pat. No. 9,755,704). The multichannel audio signal audio data is then processed using a stereo augmentation process and outputted to the appropriate speaker. Relative to a conventional hearing aid, here the augmentation happens as part of one process, not two independent processes.
As more features have been added to the suite of capabilities on smart devices and hearing wearables (“hearables”) employing Bluetooth or other similar short-range wireless interconnection methods, strains on processing power have become increasingly apparent. Sound augmentation is a computationally expensive process and there exists a need to devise efficient means to perform this process while maintaining the integrity of the hearing experience for the user. Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide computationally efficient and high-quality sound augmentation processing methods for stereo audio devices.